Grzegorz Godlewski has a new post to his blog that looks at some of the concepts and practices around automated software deployment and development (specifically with Phing).

Phing is a tool designed for automated project building based on Apache Ant distributed as a PEAR extension. It provides the user with the possibility of building the project / application in the same manner as make does with its Makefiles, making complex process execution (which is commonly human error prone) much easier.

He walks you through the steps for getting Phing set up, the directory structure you'll need for your project and a sample build and property files as well as an example of the output from the build execution. He talks about filters, execution control, extensibility and looks at some of the things that he suggests automating.